Christopher Guest Shuts Down An Age-Old Rumor About ‘This Is Spinal Tap’

Legendary English guitarist Jeff Beck likely owns dozens of amplifiers, but there’s no reason for This Is Spinal Tap fans to believe that any of them go to eleven.

Back in 1984, four of comedy’s all-time greatest artists came together and formed a humor supergroup to rival the Yardbirds in terms of the involved parties’ future successes. Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean made the most impactful and most oft-quoted mockumentary in history of music with This Is Spinal Tap, a part-pastiche, mostly-parody of the real-life rockumentaries that were popular in the 1970s along with the bands of the decade, which had since entered their twilight years as rockstars. Now, as Spinal Tap prepares to literally get the band back together with Spinal Tap II: The End Continues premiering this Friday, Guest, is ready to set the record straight on some music industry mythos surrounding his fictional rocker Nigel Tufnel.

For years, fans of both This Is Spinal Tap and classic rock and roll have believed that the character of Tufnel was based on Beck, given the striking resemblance Guest bore to the late rock legend in the film. However, in a new interview with Rolling Stone, Guest shot that theory down that his hairstyle in This Is Spinal Tap was based on Beck's signature long, scraggly cut — Tufnel just looked like that because the studio didn’t give them enough money for a men’s wig.

“We had no money doing the first movie,” Guest explained of the notoriously shoestring This Is Spinal Tap budget during the interview, noting that the costuming department was decidedly cash-strapped. “There was a hair person that said, ‘We’ll just go and look up wigs,’" Guest recalled of the character design meeting that led to Tufnel’s iconic look, noting that the hairpiece chosen for the role wasn’t what he expected. “It was like a woman’s wig. And she said, ‘Well, I’ll just cut it in a kind of a rock & roll style.’”

After This Is Spinal Tap became a surprise classic comedy, rock fans assumed that Guest had purposefully made himself up to be Beck’s doppelganger for the role, but, in truth, the mockumentary king couldn’t have even picked the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer out of a lineup when he began shooting. “I had heard Jeff Beck, but I don’t know if I had ever seen a picture where I went, ‘Oh, that’s the guy,’” Guest admitted. “And I had never seen video of him.” 

Later, after Guest and Spinal Tap became veritable rock-and-roll sensations in their own right, Guest said that he did eventually meet Beck and the two developed a friendly relationship — but Beck never asked Guest if Tufnel was supposed to be making fun of him. Maybe Beck never saw the resemblance, or maybe he just didn’t think that anyone would ever think of The Yardbirds, The Jeff Beck Group or any of his other projects when they heard the tear-jerking single “Lick My Love Pump.”